While I find some of the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman‘s films tiresome, I’m always amazed by his capacity to write with light, how he frames a shot and captures an image.
When his movies are good, however, they are brilliant. I recently recounted how Fanny and Alexander moved me. I also find his films Wild Strawberries and Through a Glass Darkly while not as powerful at that flick, they remain meaningful meditations on our relationships to each other and to what lies beyond (or within).
Well, it turns out he wasn’t just a great filmmaker, he also was a champion of freedom, standing up to Swedish authorities who overtaxed him. When they arrested him for tax evasion,
. . . the director ripped the ever-expanding Swedish government bureaucracy which, he wrote in a letter to the newspaper Expressen, “grows like a galloping cancer” and very publicly decided to abandon the country for West Germany. . . . As one of his Swedish biographers noted, the Social Democratic press campaign against the director lasted into the late 1980s, after he had returned from exile.
And he didn’t much care for the radical movements of the 1960s. According to Michael Moynihan at Reason.com, “in his 1988 autobiography The Magic Lantern,” he took issue with student radicals:
It is possible some brave researcher will one day investigate just how much damage was done to our cultural life by the 1968 movement…Today, frustrated revolutionaries still…do not see (and how could they!) that their contribution was a deadly slashing blow at an evolution that must never be separated from its roots. In other countries where varied ideas are allowed to flourish at the same time, tradition and education were not destroyed. Only in China and Sweden were artists and teachers scorned…
Guess it’s time to update my Netflix queue. And to scoop up a few copies of that book to share with my liberal film-loving friends.
While I don’t judge artists by their politics, it’s worth noting that during Hitler’s ascendency and throughout WW2, Bergman was an ardent Nazi sympathizer from where he lived in neutral Sweden. While Bergman insists revelations over Nazi atrocities changed his mind at the war’s conclusion, the late film critic Richard Grenier asserts that it took Bergman another ten years or so to reverse his stance, apparently harboring the belief that the Holocaust was a hoax.
My reason to love Ingmar Bergman:
Bibi Andersson
(Who also spent a night in jail for tax evasion).
Miss Andersson is still acting — magnificently. She is also the most beautiful 70-plus year old around today.
GPW, cool post. There are some Bergman films that I like quite a lot. I hadn’t ever looked into his political history, though. Now I like him that little bit more. Just don’t tell me he was the kind of director who had relationships with 14-year olds. (Just kidding: in the event that he was, of course I’d rather know the truth.)
Aargh, and there we have it. Thank you for the link, sierra.
It’s interesting:
I could go with any number of angles on that. It’s an artist-as-political-fool story. It’s a political-fool-having-the-courage-to-admit-the-truth-eventually story. And, given that Nazism was foundationally a movement of the Left, it’s even a bit of a political-fool-is-a-leftist-and-leftists-have-a-strange-fascination-with-brutal-dictators story.
#5 – I’ll go with it, ILC. Sounds a lot like The Snob and his own minions (including the sycophantic press) to me.
Regards,
Peter H.